Natalia Pavelkova
“ZOOLOGY” My rating: B-
91 minutes | No MPAA rating
By turns funny, grotesque and touching, “Zoology” is a modern-day fable about a woman whose life is transformed by, well, an unexpected growth spurt.
Natasha (a terrific Natalya Pavelkova) is a paper pusher at a local zoo in a Russian city so emotionally stifling that everything, from the leaden sea and sky to the graffiti-marred concrete walls, is the same blueish gray.
Natasha is gray, too. She’s in her fifties but looks much older; her unkempt hair is turning white, and she wears drab, shapeless, colorless clothing.
The other women in the zoo’s administrative offices make fun of her (once a mean girl, apparently, always a mean girl) and play nasty tricks. The one good thing about Natasha’s job is that it gives her a chance to commune with the animals; on the sly she slips sausages to the big cats and throws bread crumbs to the ducks.
Early on in Ivan I. Tveerdovsky’s film Natasha seeks medical help for lower back pain. It’s only when she’s on the X-ray table that her terrible secret is revealed.
She has grown a tail, a fleshy, hairless thing that hangs down behind her knees.
This appendage has a mind of its own, twitching and throbbing. In the bath it surfaces through the suds like a submarine’s periscope. (All the “tail” effects appear to be practical, no computer animation. They’re utterly convincing.)
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